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college called Hypothermia; Banjo was telling about London. Greta was saying she was going home.
Great, boys, great, break it up! You've escalated, like I mean you are now a choir, not just a group,
okay, this secular stint? At Nottingham tomorrow night, you're a choir, see? So we hitch our fortunes to
Colin Charteris, tomorrow's saint, the author of Fuzzy Sets.
Oh, he's on about sex again! I'm going home, said Greta, and went. Her mum lived only just down the
road in a little house on the Inner Relief; Greta didn't live there any more, but they had not quarrelled, just
drifted gently apart on the life-death stream. Greta liked squalor and the arabesque decline. What she
could not take were the rows of indoor plants with which her mother hedged herself.
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Sister, they've decimalised us
All of the values are new
Bet you the five-penny piece in my hip
When I was a child on that old £. s. d.
There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship
Sailing on every ha-penny...
They were used to Burton's madness. He had got them the crowds, the high voices from the front aisles.
They needed the faces there, the noise, the interference, the phalanx of decibels the audience threw back
at them in self-defence, needed it all, and the stink and empathy, to give right out and tear a larynx. In the
last verse, The goods you buy with this new coinage, they could have talkchant as counterpoint instead of
instru-ment between lines. May be even Saint Charteris would go for that. Saint Loughborough? Some
people said he was a Commu-nist, but he could be all the things they needed, even become fodder for
song. They looked back too much. The future and its thoughts they needed. Lips close, New pose, Truth
lies in static instants. Well, it had possibilities.
With Charteris tranced, labouring at his masterwork, cutting, superimposing, annotating, Angeline
wandered about the house. A tramp lived upstairs in the back room, old yellow mouth like an
eye-socket. She avoided him. The front room upstairs was empty because it got so damp where the rain
poured in. She stood on the bare frothy boards staring out at the sullen dead sea with shores of city
rubbish, poor quality rubbish, becalming flocks of gulls, beaks as cynical as the smiles of reptiles from
which they had originated. Land so wet, so dark, so brown nearest black, late February and the trains all
running half-cocked with the poor acid head drivers forgetting their duties, chasing their private cobwebs,
hot for deeper stations. Nobody was human any more. She'd be better advised to take LSD and join the
psychotomimjority, forget the old guilt theories, rub of old mother-sores. Charteris gave her hope,
seemed he thought the situation was good and could be im-proved within fuzzy limits, pull all things from
wreckage back. Wait till you read 'Man the Driver', he told Phil Brasher. You will see. No more conflicts
once everyone recognises that he always was a hunter, all time. The modern hunter has become a driver.
His main efforts do not go towards improving his lot, but complicating ways of travel. It's all in the big
pattern of time-space-mind. In his head is a multi-value motorway. Now, after the Kuwaitcoup, he is free
to drive down any lane he wants, any way. No external frictions or restrictions any more. Thus spake
Charteris. She had felt compelled to listen, thus possibly accomplishing Phil's death. There had been a
rival group setting up in the cellars of Loughborough, the Mellow Bellows. They had taken one title out of
thin air: There's a fairy with an Areopagitica, No external frictions or restrictions, We don't need law or
war or comfort or that bourgeois stuff, No external frictions or restrictions. Of course, they did say he
was a communist or something. What we needed was freedom to drive along our life lines where we
would, give or take the odd Brasher. More irrational fragments of the future hit her: through him, of
course; a weeping girl, a - a baked bean standing like a minute scruple in the way of self-fulfilment.
She wanted him to have her, if she could square her con-science about Phil. He was okay, but - yes, a
change was so so welcome. Sex, too, yes, if he didn't want too much of it. The waste always lay outside
the window. He was clean-looking; good opening for bright lad - where had she overheard that? Well, it
was self-defence. Wow that smash-up, still she trembled.
The gulls rose up from the mounds of rotting refuse, forming lines in the air. A dog down there, running,
free, so free, com-panion of man, sly among the mountains. Perhaps now man was going to be as free as
his companion. Trees in their future? Green? Bare?
Tears trickling down her cheek. Tears falling new from her sad speckled dreams. Even if it proved a
better way of life, good things would be lost. Always the loss, the seepage. My sepia years. Sorry, Phil, I
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